Manfred Follow-Up: Emily Bernhard Jackson

Reflecting on her paper 'Appearance and the Role of Guilt in Manfred', Emily Bernhard Jackson explores the implications of incest in Byron's play and why it is still such a controversial topic to discuss.

Why do you think incest is still such an emotive and contentious issue within conversations about Byron’s life and works? 

This is an interesting and tough question. I think modern culture is still disquieted by incest -- I'd hesitantly venture that this is in large part because we tend to think of it monolithically as parent/child and as non-consensual (at least outside Game of Thrones) -- and I think therefore readers don't want to dwell on it. But also...if you'll forgive what seems like a tangent, I was reading an article recently about Ian Brady, an English murderer who committed some truly horrible crimes, and the article suggested that the reason he is so hated is because he raises for people the possibility that they could do that, that they are potentially also that evil. But I don't think that's true: I think sometimes we recoil from things because they seem inhuman; they seem utterly beyond what we can fathom a human being wanting to do. I'd say Byron's incest falls into this category for many. It's so alien to most people that they shrink back from it, and hence it becomes emotive.  Also, of course, in a situation like this we run up against the same problem we encounter with someone like T.S. Eliot: can we admire as an artist someone whom we find morally reprehensible? In Don Juan, Juan doesn't take part in the cannibalism because Byron knows you can't have your hero be a cannibal and still expect readers to see him as a hero. Similarly, I think for many people a person can't commit incest and still be a person to whom books and close studies and close thought should be dedicated. So they argue that he didn't do it, or that there isn't enough proof to say he did it for sure. In that way, they can continue to study him without having to face up to a disquieting dissonance.  That being said, I think it would be very interesting to see how Byron's incest, and Manfred's, would be treated in criticism that emerges from another culture.  I know, for example, that there are Eastern countries in which the tradition long was that children who were to be married as adults were raised in the same household, so they could get used to each other. Would a culture that follows that tradition find the author's and hero's incest less unpleasant? I would love to know. 

Has the discourse about incest changed over the 200 years since Manfred’s publication? For example, have we moved from the question ‘Did Manfred/Byron engage in incestuous behaviour’ to other questions around this issue?

This is also a difficult question, so forgive my lengthy answer.  Well, there's now sufficient proof to be 99% certain that Byron did have sex with his half-sister, so we've moved on from that question just because of preponderance of evidence. As for Manfred, I don't think I've seen any recent articles wondering what he did. I think, in the case of Manfred, this may simply be because the profession has moved to much more niche criticism, in the sense that more and more scholars explore a particular niche, so a subject as broad as "the significance of the incest in Manfred" is less likely to be written about.  As for how the discourse surrounding Manfred's behaviour changed, as I've been doing the reading for a revised version of my symposium paper I've been reminded that in the 1980s and 90s there were a lot of articles that interpreted his relationship with Astarte as a form of narcissism, or read her as an anima. Those are the most common readings I've seen, and I think of them as very much of their Freudian time. I've always found them slightly funny, and I've always thought of them as a way to avoid discussing the fact of the real-world incest between Byron and Augusta.  The thing is, I think, the connection via incest between Manfred and Byron throws a wrench into the works of a lot of critical readings and approaches because it can't be simply textual. Unlike something like, say, the gravedigger in Hamlet (apologies to all Early Modernists), Manfred's incest isn't purely symbolic, or purely an expression of some cultural or social subtext: at least part of what Manfred's incest symbolizes is Byron's incest. Thus, to read it as simply part of the text, as only a symbol that does abstract work, is to disrespect the text in a very central way. I've always been wary of biographical criticism, but as I've worked more in the profession I've come to think that there are some biographical facts that are simply too significant to be ignored. I'd say incest -- and perhaps especially incest that you trumpet about in your work -- is one of those facts.  In what I think is one of the best essays about the play, written in 1992, D. L. MacDonald points out that because we still haven't managed to engage with Byron's own incest we haven't examined a whole possible area of meaning in the play. After a number of years as a Byronist I've come to a deep scholarly conclusion: Byron was a Strange Man. Like MacDonald, I think Byron criticism should take some time to plumb that strangeness. It's a mistake, I think, for us either simply to hope that he didn't commit incest or simply to judge him by our sense of right and wrong -- which I'm not at all sure he shared. I think if we want to move the discourse about Manfred's incest forward, we need to try to understand what incest meant to Byron, how it figured on his mattering map, and, based on that, why he dealt with it as he did, and as frankly as he did, in his work.